Manage your subscription

Feedback

16 June 1990

THE Bank of England was taking no chances last week in announcing the
introduction of its new Pounds sterling 5 note. As well as issuing journalists
with a fairly draconian list of instructions governing the circumstances
in which they could reproduce copies of the notes in magazines and newspapers,
and the form in which the photographs could appear, it also stipulated that
‘these photographs and any copies, plates, and other materials used in making
the reproductions must be destroyed immediately after use’. As one of Feedback’s
better heeled colleagues commented, Pounds sterling 5 is fairly small change
these days; still, you can see the bank’s point.

Meanwhile, although various commentators have pointed out that, by choosing
to put a portrait of George Stevenson on the fiver, the bank is in danger
of rekindling the row about who really started the railways, no one has
picked up on the picture chosen to adorn the new Pounds sterling 20 note,
to be issued sometime next year. The Pounds sterling 20 note will feature
a portrait of Michael Faraday. Faraday happens to be the favourite scientist
of Margaret Thatcher, as the Prime Minister herself made clear in a speech
to the Royal Society a couple of years ago. It’s hardly important, but we
wondered where the idea for the portrait came from.

* * *

IF YOU can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Feedback is intrigued by the following
tale, currently the subject of an investigation by Britain’s nuclear safety
watchdog, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate.

The NII is looking into the claim by a Suffolk farmer that he evaded
all the security checks at the Sizewell B nuclear power station construction
site. The farmer, 50-year-old father of four Roger Stearn, is a stalwart
of the National Farmers’ Union and the Country Landowners’ Association.
He’s long been opposed to nuclear power because he cannot get insurance
to cover the risk of his 260-acre farm being contaminated with radioactive
crud.

Recently, he claims, he donned a hard hat, opened his shirt in the appropriate
building workers’ style and, sporting a clip board, wandered onto the Sizewell
B construction site. He claims he was allowed to wander at will, over a
number of hours. He also, he says, got hold of a copy of the plan for the
radioactive waste building. He took it off site and photocopied it before
sending it back. He let the police know about his escapade and even wrote
a letter to Nuclear Electric, for whom Sizewell B is being built.

Stearn has also told the local press about his exploit. What he has
not revealed is how he got onto the closely guarded site, though he insists
he didn’t go in under the wire.

* * *

SECURITY aside, Feedback has been worrying about another issue recently:
the unwillingness of chemistry graduates to go into teaching. The problem
has also been worrying government. In 1989 it tried to remedy the situation
by offering a ‘bonus’ of Pounds sterling 1300 to anyone who would train
to be a chemistry teacher. This led to a temporary increase in applicants,
as other science students, such as biologists and biochemists, found it
more expedient to say they wanted to be chemistry teachers. Now even this
source has dried up.

Just how few chemistry graduates want to be teachers is revealed by
another bonus scheme. The Society for Chemical Industry (SCI) is offering
30 prizes of Pounds sterling 1000 to trainee teachers in return for writing
an essay entitled ‘The potential benefits of applied chemistry to society
in the 1990s’. The SCI has received so few essays that it will be left with
most of the Pounds sterling 30,000 prize money on its hands. In desperation,
it has extended the closing date to 22 June.

If the experience of the department of education at the University of
East Anglia is anything to go by, the few applicants wanting to be science
teachers are mainly older people retraining. The class list for the current
academic year includes a car salesman, a legal secretary, a policewoman,
a medical representative, an RAF instructor and a New Zealand sheep-shearer.
All excellent people, no doubt, but it does make you wonder where the next
generation of younger chemistry teachers is to come from.

* * *

THE medical profession seems to be leaving no stone unturned in documenting
ailments associated with late-20th-century life. We heard recently of someone
in North America who went to their doctor with an aching arm. The doctor
had had several similar cases and, after questioning the patient, diagnosed
it as ‘camcorder elbow’.

Meanwhile, the Letters pages of the May 17 issue of the New England
Journal of Medicine bring news of two new conditions associated with video
games. First, there is ‘Nintendinitis’, a sore thumb, as suffered by a 35-year-old
woman who had played for five hours non-stop with one of the Japanese Nintendo
video games which are currently all the rage in the US. The doctor prescribed
a painkiller and ‘abstinence from video games for several days’.

More alarming perhaps, was a case of ‘Nintendo epilepsy’ in which a
13-year-old girl suffered a seizure lasting two to three minutes while playing
Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers game for three hours with only a 10-minute
break. Here the doctor prescribed an anticonvulsant drug because the girl
and her parents feared that she was too hooked on the game to give it up.

But help is at hand, at least for sufferers of Nintendinitis. A new
gadget just demonstrated at the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago
costs $40 and converts voice commands into electronic commands. So enthusiasts
need no longer rely on rapid hand-control movements while playing their
games.